The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám is the title that Edward FitzGerald gave to his 1859 translation from Farsi to English of a selection of quatrains attributed to Omar Khayyam (1048–1131), dubbed "the Astronomer-Poet of Persia".FitzGerald's work at first was unsuccessful commercially. But it was popularised from 1861 onward by Whitley Stokes, and the work came to be greatly admired by the Pre-Raphaelites in England. In 1872 FitzGerald had a third edition printed, which increased interest in the work in the United States of America. By the 1880s, the book was extremely well known throughout the English-speaking world, to the extent that numerous "Omar Khayyam Clubs" were formed and there was a "fin de siècle cult of the Rubaiyat". FitzGerald's work has been published in several hundred editions, and it has inspired similar translation efforts in English and in many other languages.